


el día que me quieras

by roselland



Category: Suite Française (2015)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Post-Canon, Post-World War II, Romance, slightly AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-13 05:44:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4510071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roselland/pseuds/roselland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world." - Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried</p><p>Lucile, rebuilding. </p><p>(Or - my imaginary renderings of what actually happened after the end of the 2015 film Suite Française, based on the novel by Irene Némirovsky)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Germany

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this work is the title of the tango standard, "El día que me quieras" (usually translated as "The Day You Love Me", music by Carlos Gardel, lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera). I recommend listening to it!! The song has now been recorded like, hundreds and hundreds of times, including once by Gloria Estefan, but it was originally performed by Carlos Gardel in 1935. I was surprised that there's not really any kind of official English translation for the lyrics, which are lovely in Spanish. Most of the ones online are kinda iffy imho, but this is the one I referenced most often: http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~coby/songtr/tangos/eldia.htm

They tell you the war will soon be over. They say it again and again, tomorrow and tomorrow, so many times that the words lose their meaning. You stop believing them, and do not start believing in anything again until one day you wake up, look out the window of your rented room in Paris, and find the Germans gone.

Simply vanished, just like when they disappeared from Bussy, leaving hardly a whisper of dust in their wake.

On that day you say quietly into your pillow, _the war is over_ , and you think it might be true.

The months that follow, with the whole world watching Germany spasm towards surrender, do not feel victorious. They feel paralyzing, and you wander around dazed, wondering what to do next. There is no one left to tell you. Madame Angellier died in the spring of 1944, a heart attack you think may have been merciful – she never learned the news that eventually trickled back to you of Gaston’s death in a German prison camp in 1942.

Benoit Labarie returns to his farm, reuniting with Madeleine on the outskirts of what remains of Bussy. You can’t really picture it, him going right back to the life he led before. Hasn’t it changed him, what he did in the war? It has changed you.

You suppose this is what people do, and have done, for as long as there have been people – for as long as there have been wars. They take their war-selves off like coats that don’t fit anymore, and they go on living.

But still. You, Lucile Angellier, you do not _ever_ want to go back to Bussy.

You pack up your things and everything fits into one small leather suitcase: the old, fine clothes that hang off your frame now, your books, Madame Angellier’s will, and a little parcel of rolled-up sheet music that is more precious to you than anything else you own. You park yourself at a café with an atlas and look for someplace far away, somewhere warm and untouched and free.

You pick Argentina mostly because once, a lifetime ago now, you heard Carlos Gardel singing on your father’s radio. You didn’t understand the lyrics then, and you think perhaps you’d like to. The song sounded… it sounded the way you thought being in love must feel, back before you had really loved anyone.

So you will go to Buenos Aires, find a little stucco house on the edge of the city with roses climbing up the walls, and play tango records until you feel human again. But first (and it takes a few glasses of wine to make the decision, but you won’t go back on it), you have a stop to make.

* * *

 

When you arrive in Germany, you almost immediately decide that you will travel to South America by car, train, boat, or absolutely any other kind of vehicle as long as you never, ever have to get in an airplane.

It should have been beautiful, flying. Maybe it was, once upon a time. When that first person made it all the way up to the clouds and looked down upon the great heaving earth, maybe he or she saw the masses below looking up, gazing on in wonder and delight.

In Berlin they don’t look up at the airplanes anymore. They shudder and bury their heads beneath jacketed arms, struggle to go about their business because they know – they _know_ – these planes, now, don’t carry any bombs. But they can’t stop knowing that other planes _did_.

You never want to be a part of making anybody feel like that.

* * *

 

Everyone in the city seems to be looking for someone. Your story, if anyone asks, is not a unique one: your husband died in a prison camp, and you would like to know where he is buried. You’re not _really_ lying. After all, you do think you want to go looking for Gaston, one day, if you ever make it back to Germany. Anyway, no one cares enough to ask why you are there, or why you think you might find your husband’s grave at one of the various properties around the city formerly owned by members of the von Falk family.

The first address you try sends you to a bombed-out street in the British sector, nothing left but an old man with a skinny dog trotting at his heels. He tells you (or you’re pretty sure he does – your German is cobbled together from an old phrase book and lessons from a friendly Alsatian partisan you met in ’43) that the woman who once lived in the house you are looking for was married to an officer who disappeared, somewhere in Russia, maybe.

You take a deep breath, because disappeared is not dead, not yet, and try to feign interest when he says the officer’s wife ran off with an Englishman not long after they took the city.

The next place is harder to find, deep in the Soviet sector, but you aren’t afraid. You’ve gotten good at passing unnoticed over the last few years. The elder von Falks’ home is still standing, although you’re not sure how, seeing as half the façade has been torn away and much of the second floor is smashed to bits. The house next door suffered less damage, and appears to be inhabited, so you knock.

The woman who answers cannot be much older than you, but there is far more gray in her hair. She is frighteningly thin, except for a small, slightly protruding belly, which she covers protectively with one hand.

“ _Guten tag_ ,” you say, and you hesitate, because she looks so very tired, this woman. “Do you know – the house?” You point. “Um – Family? Bruno von Falk?”

Her eyes narrow suspiciously.

“Why?” she asks, and you look back at her helplessly. There are too many answers to that question.

“I would like – find him. Please. _Bitte_.”

She flicks a glance at your abdomen, gestures between it and her own rounded one.

“Are you…?”

You shake your head, no. She gives you a long, thoughtful look. If she thinks you are judging her, you are not. You are the last person in the world who would.

“You are French?” she says finally, switching to a heavily accented version of your own native language. You feel your shoulders sag in relief.

“I am.” She nods.

“The von Falks were my cousins,” she tells you. “The parents died when that bomb hit their house. Two sons are also dead. Karl, the youngest, he is alive, but he is a French prisoner. Something to do with Africa, I think. Bruno…” She shrugs. “I don’t know. He was in Russia, last anyone heard. His wife says dead, but she would.”

Her face sours at that, and she fists her hand in her gown over her stomach.

“Russians did this,” she says, bitterly, her expression far away and haunted. “I don’t – I don’t know which one.”

Oh. You don’t know what to say. You want to take her hand, comfort her in some way, you want to – but Bruno’s cousin is lifting her chin at you, angry pride in the set of her mouth.

“My name is Lucile,” you blurt. “What is yours?”

Her chin drops. Surprised, she replies: “My name is Maria.”

This is something. You can remind her of her name, and that she has one. She is still a real person, even if the world around her has turned into an absurd, terrible dream. No matter what she did in the war, or what will happen to her now that it is over, she once helped a French woman named Lucile, and that is something.

You dig your letter out of your purse, feeling a strange kind of faith that you have felt nowhere else in Berlin.

“If Bruno comes back,” you say, pressing the envelope into her hands, “if you see him, can you please – please give him this.”

Maria takes it, watching you curiously, saying nothing.

“ _Danke schön_ ,” you murmur, and turn to leave. You take two steps and then you hear her call you back.

“Lucile!” Maria’s eyes are bright and sad. You notice for the first time how beautiful she is. Her features are sharp and spare, but handsome, arresting in their animation.

“They had a country house,” she says quickly. “South of here, near Lübbenau. Bruno always liked it better than in Berlin. If it’s still – ” Maria stops and bites her lower lip.

“You should try there."

* * *

 

The proprietress of your dilapidated little hotel in the French sector is thrilled to provide you with a map. She has been thrilled to provide you with anything and everything you could possibly want, actually – you are her first and only guest in over a year. She is also thrilled, of course, that your people have occupied the city and finally got rid of those awful Nazis – she was never a Nazi, nobody she knew was a Nazi, nobody in _Germany_ , apparently, ever supported the Nazi party and she knew from the beginning that Hitler was a crazy man.

Charitably, you do not mention the swastika flag you discovered stuffed in the back of the closet on your first day in Berlin.

You also do not tell her how the map breaks your heart. There is no way you can go to Lübbenau. None of these railroads exist anymore – the Allies bombed them all to hell. You cannot afford a car for that distance, and even if you could, you doubt you could bluff your way through all the checkpoints you know are littering the eastern half of the country. Your search is over. And maybe it would have been better if you had never started, never had any hopes at all. He is probably dead, long dead in some frozen Russian field, but now... now you’re stuck always wondering if the whole time, he was somewhere in the forests south of Berlin, just out of your reach.

Your hands are trembling. You ask your hostess if the hotel has a piano. She says no, there is no piano here, she doesn’t think anyone in the whole neighborhood has a piano, and to your horror, she begins to cry.

“Oh, no, Frau Berger, no, no problem. Please, it is all right.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes to stop the tears. “We never had a piano, I just – I just want you to have a good stay in my hotel – ” Her German is difficult to follow as she hiccups and sobs her way through an explanation. You pat her gently on the back, feeling utterly useless, not to mention cross, because to top it all off _there is no piano_.

Berlin is grotesque, Frau Berger is pathetic, and for a moment you allow yourself to hate them, all of them, this whole stupid country, including Maria and Bruno. They can bury their flags and pretend they are innocent, but they are not. And neither are you.

It is time to go to Argentina.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Notes (i.e. I wasted a lot of time on this because I'm a bored, unemployed history major and poorly researched historical fiction is a huge goddamn pet peeve of mine. This may end up being almost as long as the story...)
> 
> \- I don't know how old Lucile is; neither the movie nor the novel ever really specifies, so I kind of guessed based on how old Michelle Williams looks, ish. Ergo I put her listening to tango on the radio in 1935, when she's like 20-ish, and in her early thirties by the time of my story. 
> 
> \- I have also arbitrarily decided to give Bruno the birth year of 1910, making him 30-ish when he first meets Lucile. This is a compromise between the novel, in which he's supposed to be like 24, and the movie, in which Matthias Schoenaerts looks decidedly older than 24. Not that I mind. 
> 
> \- The fact that Lucile isn't supposed to speak good German in my story is a really convenient excuse for the German being shitty. 
> 
> \- And finally, I did a stupid amount of googling re: Junker military culture in the early twentieth century and German geography...
> 
> \- We don't really know what Bruno's cultural/social background is, but the hints that do we get are 1) he is from a military family, 2) "there are forests where I live" (book), and 3) he has a "von" in his name, which can sometimes, though not always, signify a noble background (add to that the fact that he's an officer, though, and it gets more likely). I elected to make him from an old Prussian family, maybe noble or maybe just really well-respected and wealthy. I have the family currently living somewhere in Berlin/Brandenburg for convenience, but I imagine they once had a few different residences all over what used to be the Kingdom of Prussia and is now bits of eastern Germany and Poland. 
> 
> \- Lübbenau is a real place, a town (city? Wikipedia was unclear) southeast of Berlin in the Spreewald region. The Spreewald is apparently a swampy forested nature preserve area with all these picturesque canals. I put the imaginary von Falks' imaginary country home here because it was pretty, not too far from the city, and seemed like a nice place to have a cottage or something. There appear to be lots of opportunities to do things like fish, hunt, ride horses and pretend to farm things, all of which aristocrats stereotypically love to do, so it felt plausible enough to me.


	2. Argentina

Argentina is nothing like what you expected, and everything you could have ever wanted.

If you were looking for peace, you have come to the wrong place. The locals seem to have accepted teetering on the brink of chaos as a way of life, and they take everything from minor changes in their dinner plans to violent coup d’états with a few cups of tea and great aplomb. They laugh loudly here, talk rapidly, fight passionately.

You love it. You love the noise and the color and the giggling children you tutor in French and music. You love your tiny white stucco house, and the pale pink roses climbing up its walls. You love your next-door neighbor, a beautiful young newlywed called, of all things, María.

She is a marvel, this María. More alive than almost anyone you’ve ever known, vivacious and stylish, plump in the attractive manner of a woman with unapologetic desires. She teases you for your dowdy clothes (“I thought all French women dressed like Coco Chanel!”), and teases herself for being “quite fat” while serving you both a second slice of cake.

Her husband, the quiet and intellectual Sergio, doesn’t seem to mind. He is plainly besotted, and privately you share his opinion. You will never again fail to appreciate the beauty of a well-fed body.

When they invite you for dinner, you can tell they are both bursting with questions they do not ask, about France, Europe, the war – all of it. María has already told you once, breathlessly, that she and her husband met when they were both marching in support of the Allied cause.

They are the kind of people who are always marching for something or other: idealists, full of big words and nervous hopes. They are not sure how they feel about Perón. It’s early days yet. They think your opinion would be worth something, if you would give it. You, they say, have been through _real_ conflict.

You realize, with a hot rush of embarrassment, that they think this has made you wise.

You demur and change the subject. Even if you had had any interest in politics before the war, you’re pretty sure you wouldn’t now. Politicians never do any of the fighting, see.

By midnight, the three of you have finished two full bottles of wine, and the stars in the inky blue sky above you are beginning to take on a blurry glimmer. A tipsy María settles herself in Sergio’s lap, her eyes dark and shining and hungry. He stares at her nakedly, looking half-sick with longing.

 _You have her_ , you want to scream. _What else could you possibly want? Why can’t you both be satisfied, for God’s sake?_

They send you identical expressions of poorly disguised relief when you plaster on a smile and make your excuses. You suspect they won’t even make it back to their bedroom; they’ll just slip out of their clothes and slide right to the cool tile floor, their entwined bodies illuminated by the moonlight. Your jealousy is an ugly, lustful thing clawing at your stomach as you stumble towards home.

You run a bath to calm yourself down, put on your favorite record, and scold yourself for feeling even the slightest bit resentful. They are only selfish in the way all lovers are selfish, and they would hate to know that they had hurt you, even accidentally.

It is 1946, over ten years since Carlos Gardel’s plane went flaming down in the mountains of Colombia. But here, in this lonely corner of Buenos Aires, he is still singing about that bright dawn, the bells chiming, and an end to all his grief. You know the words now. _The day when you will love me…_

You linger in the tub, the water slowly growing colder and you, regrettably, more sober. Perhaps you will just stay there for the next few hours, not sleeping, watching your skin prune and wrinkle, until sunlight sneaks around the edges of the bathroom door tomorrow morning.

It is 1946, and you do not think you can stand to spend one more night dreaming of a dead man.

* * *

 

It’s much too warm for a March evening, and you and María sit on your front stoop fanning yourselves and longing for the autumn that should really already be here.

She is alternating between her cigarette and the story she’s telling, as petals from the mimosa trees drift gently past, borne aloft on the sluggish breeze. You are vaguely aware that many of your neighbors are out and about, sometimes pausing for a second to nod or wave hello when they see you. But somehow they, too, seem merely to be drifting, light as air and inconsequential as flower petals.

“ _Alemanes_ ,” María is saying, and you are proud of yourself for hardly flinching at all, “Germans. I don’t know…”

Apparently, the city is abuzz with rumors – nobody knows how true – that Perón’s government is allowing prominent Germans, old Nazis, to wait out the Allies’ prosecutorial fervor in friendlier Argentine climes.

“Would it be terrible for you?” María asks. “You must hate them. I think I would, if I were you.”

You shrug.

“I tried,” you say, more honest than you might be if the weather were cooler, or the mood not quite so dreamy. “It’s useless. You have to start hating everybody after a while. Otherwise you lose track of who you’re supposed to be angry with, and who you’re not.”

María purses her lips and blows out a long stream of smoke. You are grateful that, when she turns her big brown eyes on you, they hold no pity.

“And you keep telling us you’re not wise, _hermana_ ,” she says lightly.

 _I’m not,_ you want to say. _Just forgetful_.

“I don’t like it,” María decides. “If Perón is really a fascist then he’s no better than the imperialists, in the end.”

“Not all the Germans were Nazis,” you say.

“Too many were,” she counters, and you nod, because it’s true, and stare out at the street.

“Yes.”

You don’t know how long the two of you sit there, watching the city meander towards darkness, but María makes it through at least another cigarette, because at some point she pulls out the box and offers you one, which you decline. You can’t seem to stop seeing familiar faces on the people walking by. They keep reminding you of your old neighbors from Bussy, your Parisian comrades, the young soldiers you used to glimpse in passing. These people could be those people, if a war ever came here. María seems to have an idea of war as populated by extraordinary or exceptional characters, transcendently good or unspeakably evil, infallible in either respect.

It isn’t. War happens to perfectly ordinary people.

You are deep enough in this thought that you are at first unconcerned when one perfectly ordinary person stops in front of your house. A tall person, in a nice suit, overdressed for the season. He opens the gate, slowly, and takes a few hesitant steps forward. You stand, too quickly, the blood rushing headlong through your veins, and he freezes at once. Your head is having trouble keeping up with the realization your body appears to have already had. He can’t be here, standing in front of you, except that he must be, because María is tugging at your sleeve and asking if you know him.

You do.

He said you wouldn’t recognize him, but oh, you _do_. It’s not just his face; you know the way the air moves around him, how space changes, the tangibility of his presence rendering the hazy twilight suddenly sensible. Of course everything seems unreal tonight. He is the only thing that has ever been real. You can barely feel María’s hand on your arm; she is hardly there.

My soldier, you think, and then: he looks thin.

Before, he was so beautifully strong, strong enough to scoop you up and set you upon a countertop as if you were weightless. His shoulders are no less broad, but now he looks… god help you, frail.

“ _Bonsoir_ ,” Bruno says, in his clipped accent.

In another second you are in his arms, clutching tightly to the lapels of his jacket, his forehead resting on yours, and neither of you cries. He smells the same, of tobacco and clean wool, and your desire pulls at you in such a familiar way. Together, you just breathe.

“Lucile?” María asks. You jump back, old instinct suddenly taking over, your heart fluttering in your throat as if the Madame were right behind the door again. Bruno clears his throat and looks hard at the ground at María’s feet.

But María doesn’t look betrayed, or disgusted or angry – just curious, and a little concerned. She doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t know what this means. She sees only you, her mousy refugee neighbor, with a man seemingly important to you, a man you have never once mentioned.

“ _¿Estás bien?_ ”

“ _Sí_ ,” you reassure her. “ _Sí, todo bien_.”

She nods, shoots Bruno a penetrating glance, and tosses a falsely breezy _chau_ over her shoulder as she beats a tactical retreat. There will be no more keeping secrets from her now; but for the first time, you realize you never really had to.

All these Marias in your life, offering you salvation. Maybe someone is trying to tell you something.

Bruno’s fingers brush yours, and you aren’t sure who moved first. But you don’t take his hand, not yet.

“You got my letter,” you say.

“You went to Germany,” he replies, by way of an answer. “You went looking for me.”

 _Of course I did_. You lick your too-dry lips.

“You promised me we would see each other again. I believed you.”

He laughs, just once; the sound is rusty and harsh, and when it is over you long to hear it again.

“Did you?” he asks, wonderingly. “Did you?”

Now, at last, you lace your fingers through his, and lead him into the house.

* * *

 

He takes in your new home with wide eyes; you imagine he is trying to understand the life you have built for yourself here, in this faraway place. Sitting at your kitchen table, he doesn’t look quite right. Somehow he looks even less at home than he did all those years ago, in Gaston’s study.

A few feet away, sheltered behind the stove where you are making tea, you feel a moment of paralyzing panic. What if you have made a mistake? What if it is far too late for any of this? What good could possibly come of trying to steal back your past?

You turn to music, as you always have, and when you bring the tea things to the table you say quickly,

“I still have a piano. I mean - a new one. In the parlor. That’s what I’m doing now, I teach piano lessons. And sometimes French.”

Bruno takes a cup with a tiny, sad smile, and waits for you to sit down across from him.

“Do you enjoy it?” he asks politely, and there is a beat in which you both look at each other and recognize the ridiculousness of this small talk, this formality. The tension in your shoulders relaxes somewhat.

“I do.”

“I haven’t played the piano since France,” he says. “I don’t know if I still could.”

Arthritis, he explains. A gift, from the Siberian winter. His knuckles are perpetually swollen now, and his hands don’t stretch the way they used to.

You remember the feel of those hands on your waist, on your bare thighs.

“Will you tell me about your war?”

His expression darkens, and he sits back. You lean a little forward, for balance.

“We fought on the Eastern Front for three years after I left you,” he says quietly. “My unit was captured. They – we – they let us go, six months ago. The ones who were still alive. So I made my way back to Berlin. I found my cousin Maria there, and after I read your letter, I scraped up enough money to come here.”

“I’m sorry about your family,” you say. He jerks his head in acknowledgment.

“I’m sorry about yours. Do you miss your husband?”

You take a sip of your tea and it burns the tip of your tongue.

“Do you miss your wife?” you say, challenging him. He raises his eyebrows at you, the corners of his mouth quirking slightly up. You can almost see him thinking: _you are not as timid as you were_.

“I hear she thinks I’m dead,” he replies. “It seems cruel to disabuse her of that notion.” Turning serious again, he adds, “Anyway, life will be easier for her now, without a Nazi husband.”

“You were not a Nazi,” you say immediately. Bruno dips his head towards the table.

“No, I wasn’t,” he says. “But I fought for them anyway. I didn’t believe what they said and yet I killed for them. So what does that make me?”

 _Weak_ , you think, _like all the rest of us_. You can no longer sit here not touching him, so you put a hand on his cheek. His eyes close as your fingertips brush his skin, and for a moment he grimaces as if your tenderness is hurting him.

“You saved me,” you tell him. “You saved Benoit and me.” He opens his eyes but doesn’t meet your gaze, absorbed in some kind of terrible mental calculus.

“Two lives,” he says, bitterly. “One for the Vicomte in Bussy. One for your husband, say – is that how it works? Is my account balanced now? What about all the others I didn’t save?”

You don’t know how to respond, so you listen to the sound of him trying to control his breathing, in and out, in and out.

“I will never forgive myself,” he whispers.

“I know.”

“Life would be easier for you, too, without a German husband.”

You can’t help yourself.

“Are you proposing?”

Something sharp flashes across his face, and he snaps: “ _Lucile_.” And maybe you deserved that, but now your back is up.

“Well, are you?! What would you like me to say, Bruno?” you cry. “Why are you here then? I know what you are, I’ve always known, it doesn’t – it doesn’t matter to me. Maybe it should but I – I felt like myself for the first time when I was with you, and you can’t know what that means to me, I – you – ”

You stop, because your words are spinning out of your control and your mind is racing. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair that you can’t close yourself off from him the way you can with the whole rest of the world. He is staring at you now with a sort of slack astonishment, and you simply can't _not_ tell the truth. What a strange responsibility you have given him, a power he doesn’t even know he wields.

“Surely you didn’t come all this way just to tell me my life would be easier without you.”

“I came,” he says, soft but fervent, “because for that one summer I loved you beyond all reason. Like a madman – except it was like coming out of a delusion, and into clarity. I have spent every waking moment since praying, if I ever saw you again, that I would still be capable of it. That I would still be able to love you the way you deserve.”

“And – do you?” Your voice is shaking.

“Do I what?” He is going to make you ask him out loud, because he needs to hear the words, and perhaps you do, too.

“Do you still love me?”

Bruno smiles a little, helplessly, gentleness settling over his features. In this light, in this expression, he is breathtaking. Someone should paint him. You would, if you could.

“Beyond all reason,” he says.

You reach for him then, and he upsets the tea in his haste to get to you. It pops into your head, absurdly, that you’ll need to find a cloth to cover up the inevitable stain in the wood, and then you are being kissed for the first time in six years and you decide you can think about that tomorrow. You can think about everything tomorrow, all the questions you both will want answered and the words you haven’t said yet, the choices you will have to make.

For now, all you will think about is his mouth opening under yours, his hands spanning your back, his leg pressing yours apart, and this small moment of grace.

* * *

 

Sleep is rather hard to come by, that night.

You take him to bed and it's rough, a little bruising, difficult for the two of you to find a pace, a harmony together. There’s hardly anything left between skin and bone on either of your bodies, and it hurts when your hips knock together too hard and too fast. He murmurs apologies into your hair when you cry out, but he needn’t. You won’t apologize to him for the red indents your fingernails leave all over his shoulders, a consequence of you clinging on too fiercely as you come apart beneath him.

The desperation eases a little after that first time; you remember there's no longer any need to rush or to hide. So you go slower, finding smoother angles, drawing out more aching pleasures, lingering over parts of each other you haven’t explored yet. He is particularly enamored of the skin of your wrists; you like the dip of his collarbone, and the spot just between his ribs where you can feel his heartbeat strongest.

Lying beside him on top of your sweaty sheets, the heady scent of impending rain drifting through the open bedroom window, you tell stories of Paris, a city so beautiful all the armies left it alone. It seems backwards that that’s where you first learned how to load a pistol, and sew cyanide pills into the hem of your dress. He shares memories of Berlin before the war, and swears he will take you, one day, to see the country around Lübbenau, the rivers, glades, and forests he loves. The land, at least, is blameless. Isn't it?

You practice your German as he kisses your stomach. It makes him laugh so you keep going, chattering nonsense, until his mouth moves lower and you gasp, loudly, in very earthy French.

Much, much later, when you are both drowsy and sated and have talked yourselves hoarse, Bruno rolls over and buries his face in your neck with a sigh. His tears are silent, but they have a salty sting, falling hot and wet on the pillow. You bury your fingers in his hair, pulling him as close as you can get him, thin rivulets of his tears dripping down between your breasts. You curl yourself around him, and finally, finally, you let yourself cry.

* * *

 

In the morning, you wake to an unfamiliar melody. The music stops and starts and jolts unpredictably, searching for a rhythm. It's inexpressibly lovely, hesitant and self-conscious in its newness; you feel filled up with the sound, every inch of you, its vibrations thrumming over the surface of your skin.

Sliding out of bed, you throw on your slip and run to find him a pencil and paper.

He is sitting at the piano half-dressed, hunched over the keys. His eyes are still clouded when they meet yours, but his smile, when you present him with your gift, is as warm as the South American winter.

“ _Suite Argentin_ ,” he tells you, and your throat is too tight for words. So you say nothing. You take his face in your hands, and you kiss him and kiss him and kiss him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Notes
> 
> \- I sent Lucile to Argentina for a few reasons. First because of the tango music and the idea of music being such an important thread running through Lucile's life that she would want to go somewhere connected to it. Second, Argentina's particular history during WW2 and the postwar era.
> 
> \- By the way, Carlos Gardel really did die in a plane crash outside of Medellín in 1935, at the height of his career, thereby tragically solidifying his fame and genius for all of history. 
> 
> \- Ok, so, Argentina in the 40s: the country was neutral during WW2, as it had been during WW1, but there was strong sympathy for both Allies and Axis among different sectors of the government and citizenry. There was also significant civil and political unrest, so the atmosphere would have been restive and governments got toppled with some degree of regularity. 
> 
> \- I have not exactly specified María and Sergio's political opinions because I don't have enough knowledge of Argentine politics at the time to present an informed view, but I imagine they lean pretty far left, with a strong interest in economic justice (especially labor/workers orgs), but also civil rights/freedoms. There was a lot of left-wing activism on behalf of the Allies during the war and that was mainly the thing I wanted them to have participated in. 
> 
> \- By early 1946, when Lucile has settled in Buenos Aires, Peronism is in full force (Juan Perón having been elected president in February). The Peronist movement is notoriously difficult to define, as it brought a lot of different political groups and communities together, but words associated with it include populism, unionism, and anti-imperialism. Also fascism, demagoguery, and corporatism. Shit is complex. Don't blame María and Sergio (or me) for being confused. 
> 
> \- Perón's government is also notorious for providing shelter to Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann. To be fair, I guess, I should also say that Argentina did then and does to this day have the largest Jewish population in Latin America, and at the time they also accepted refugees from all over. 
> 
> \- What all this means for my story is that if there was anywhere where a former German soldier and a Frenchwoman were likely to be able to readily emigrate and then subsequently find each other without arousing anyone's particular curiosity, it would probably be Argentina. So that's why I picked it. Also because I like tango music.


End file.
